Feminist Academics Join Destroy-Israel Movement

The National Women’s Studies Association has voted by a huge majority to join the worldwide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Their annual conference passed the measure by a 653-86 vote, and their full membership of 12,000 will vote on it in the next two months.

That means the NWSA is on the verge of becoming the fifth American academic association to boycott Israel since April 2013. It began then with the Association for Asian American Studies, and since that time the American Studies Association, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, and now the NWSA have joined in.

The BDS movement is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and other radical and terror-supporting groups. Its aim is to “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by putting an end to Israel. Its leader are quite explicit about that.

For example, As’ad Abu Khalil: “Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of the State of Israel.” Or Ahmed Moor: “OK, fine. So BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state…. In other words, BDS is not another step on the way to the final showdown; BDS is The Final Showdown.”

None of this, of course, deterred the women’s-studies scholars from signing-on to the movement. Considering that the vote was initiated by a group called Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine, the nature of BDS was undoubtedly an added attraction for many.

“As feminist scholars, activists, teachers, and public intellectuals,” the NWSA pontificates, “we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression. In the spirit of this intersectional perspective, we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.”

The talk about “colonial displacement” puts the NWSA squarely in the camp of Fatah, Hamas, and the dissolve-Israel effort in general. The 1948 war resulted from the Arab side’s rejection of the UN partition resolution. Most of the Palestinians who left did so voluntarily. In that period 800,000 Jews were forcibly expelled from Arab countries.

Even more striking, though, is the reference to “sexual and gender-based violence.” Yes, there is such a problem in the Palestinian world. It doesn’t stem from Israel.

Twenty-six women were slain by relatives in the West Bank and Gaza in 2013, twice as many as the year before, according to official figures. The rise stems from…ongoing leniency for those killing in the name of “family honor” and social acceptance of violence against women, women’s rights activists said….

They urged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to repeal sections of a penal code that allows for short sentences of at most a few years for the perpetrators….